I am assuming without even mentioning the question that you figured out the trick in the last paragraph, which I didn't and which apparently none of the original readers did either, though my question to myself after I read about it was, of course! How could I of all people have missed this? I who love the Perecian mode that this anticipates -- this plagiarism by anticipation, as Perec says.
And then, given that, I think what really works, beyond the trick, is that it's Sybil, and not Cynthia, who did it. Cynthia could do the snow drops, but the reality and the metrical substrate ,the quasi-poetic meter of the Sybilline utterance, both are Sybil's. She signs it in the 18th century style ("who once had the honor to think himself, your obt servant, Sam Johnson"). So it's not only what happens to him but who he is thinking it through, telling it out, that is hers. And that became uncanny for me after I thought about it for a while. The uncanny superiority of Sybil to Cynthia even in death. The one sister the real strangeness, the other just another ghost. Sybil as the ghost of writing as well. Something like that. Too quick, I know, and here,
not in great haste then, still (Proximoception), our response ends.
no subject
I am assuming without even mentioning the question that you figured out the trick in the last paragraph, which I didn't and which apparently none of the original readers did either, though my question to myself after I read about it was, of course! How could I of all people have missed this? I who love the Perecian mode that this anticipates -- this plagiarism by anticipation, as Perec says.
And then, given that, I think what really works, beyond the trick, is that it's Sybil, and not Cynthia, who did it. Cynthia could do the snow drops, but the reality and the metrical substrate ,the quasi-poetic meter of the Sybilline utterance, both are Sybil's. She signs it in the 18th century style ("who once had the honor to think himself, your obt servant, Sam Johnson"). So it's not only what happens to him but who he is thinking it through, telling it out, that is hers. And that became uncanny for me after I thought about it for a while. The uncanny superiority of Sybil to Cynthia even in death. The one sister the real strangeness, the other just another ghost. Sybil as the ghost of writing as well. Something like that. Too quick, I know, and here,
not in great haste then, still (Proximoception), our response ends.